Once I had begun
I could not stopthe Neti Pot. I finally bought one. A small
Alladins lamp that looks like a ceramic kegel device that
you stick up your nasum.Look
it up if you dont know what one is. It got so bad I would
fill with angst waiting for my sinuses to clog up just so I could
use the pot to experience free breathing again. To feel the relief.
Like getting high on meditation and seeing the light just so you
could attract the attacking envious spirits and rehearse the battle
again to get it right. Over and over. Here comes the salt water.
Zoosh! There goes the light straight out the perineum with the fishhook
flower demons stuck up your ass to sprout and take root.

Where the hell
did those bastards come from? Other people? Dead people? Lost animal souls
looking for a new burrow? Combinations of these perhaps. Oh well. How
deep is the well? Deep, not deep enough for some people. Youve got
to tighten up on the right level at the right time, up and up, on each
stack, like a wedding cake, to the unity.
The little bakery store was about as big as two full sized sedans parked
side by side. It was old and in a narrow white washed two story complex
that had a small local hardware store, an ice cream hamburger place, and
the story is dead now, isnt it ? Its already dead by now.
Going nowhere. Nothings interesting. You cant top a fishhook stuck
up your ass grabbing flesh and prostate and yanking it out in bloody chunks
with a demon on the other end, can you? Whatever. Read the rest of the
story anyway. There were a few efficiency apartments that were parked
above the whole decaying mess with little square windows that all had
identical curtains. Identical minds, identical desires, identical fears,
identical paranoias, identical erections, identical periods, identical
musky pains, the identical blob of decayed thought matter hanging about
making people run like hamsters in a wheel of the mind, fiercely curious
about how to quell the desire to be fiercely curious.

A girl and her dog, a large tight skinned dark brown pit bull with black
streaks like tiger stripes were coming home, if you could call an efficiency
a home, after a walk.

The dog was dragging her across the parking lot to the ground floor stair
entrance of the apartments, jumping on her, wrestling with the leash,
ripping the harness off of her wrist, on the edge of attacking her, indignant
that she was trying to laugh it off, enjoying the fact that she was a
bit unsure how unstable her dog was, humiliated that she enjoyed having
a wild energetic animal, bubbling with happy subliminal yip
barks at her annoyance from realizing "oh boy what did I get self
into" as she became closer to losing control of her tiger dog. The
dog instinctively hated her and felt driven to mock her.

He resented being made aware that this girl considered him nothing but
a dog, an object to enjoy, a bundle of primitive energy in a skin to be
used for petty distraction. The girl lived directly above the little bakery
store where the owner of the bakery, a woman in her mid fifties, worked
ten hours daily. Posters in the window offered deals on custom wedding
and birthday cakes. There were a few plates of cookies in the small glass
display case, expertly made and of the best quality ingredients. Pride
was dripping off of them.

The pride was tired, but it was still there, tenacious. Each cookie was
a little talisman of pride and love. There were oatmeal cookies made with
real butter, cranberries, whole milk, and real sugar, and sugar cookies
with gingertraditional types of cookies with a few extra things
added to make them unique. The wedding cakes had their own tall narrow
glass case, and were fake permanent fixtures on display. The cakes had
an odd off-white color and looked like marble sculptures from some dusty
black and white photograph book on Greek history you'd find on the big
shelf in the public librarythe shelf with the art books that no
one looked at unless they took a class in art and were forced to ruminate
about why someone created an object that wasnt on a billboard or
didnt have an ad statement under it or couldnt be sold for
a lot of money at the time of its construction. I could tell from college
that art books were not for artists, they were for regular people to learn
about art, but it rarely worked out that way. Art people read magazines
about other artists, and sometimes looked at other artists art,
but only to steal from them. Students read cliff notes and other students
notes, and professors read articles in academic journals by other professors
to find material to rework into their own articles. It was a wonderfully
tight feedback loop that was tacitly justified as being a conversation.
Once I realized that noone actually read the books in the library, but
merely devised clever ways to appear that they had read them, I looked
upon all libraries, museums, and educational experiences as solely existing
to supply material for bibliographical citations. Wedding cakes werent
for eating. The sugar was too concentrated.

I was at the bakery hoping for donuts and had never been there before.
I kept planning to go there but kept putting it off and always just drove
by, looked at it and thought "man that is the smallest bakery Ive
ever seen, it looks like its been there forever". It was such
a fixture in that area of the neighborhood with its off white chipped
paint revealing older off white, like the building had been sunburned
and had patchy peeling skin, that I just categorized it into a whitewashed
background of buildings that I never felt urged to investigate. No one
was ever parked in front of that building. I guess it was all delivery
business. Besides, it was near a busy four-way intersection that destroyed
the neighborhood vibe. Drivers were propelled along into a crossroad to
make a quick decision, watch everyone elses decision, and experience
just enough distraction to avoid considering what is in the oven. I wondered
if some people that had little shops were living off inheritances, never
minding if they sold anything, and just waited for customers to order
something, hoping the customer would be someone seducible to have sex
with in the backroom after turning around the little 'open' sign on the
front door and dropping some odd statement of invitation. Maybe those
little shops with no business were meditation chambers. A person would
inherit money, start a tax shelter shop, sit there all day, process their
past lives, plot their next big move, and justify a gentle retreat. Sure
was an odd way to spend your life though, sort of in hibernation. Then
again maybe business just fell off due to competition from the bigger
shops and the big bakeries in the giant grocery stores. Nobody was intentionally
hibernating. Nowadays any hibernation or meditation was forced out of
discomfort or necessity. People were manufacturing their little pearls
here and there and getting harvested by the great astral opportunistic
vacuum cleaner left and right. During their dreamtime fishhooks right
in the brain yanked them into a bewildering black space full of lights,
angels, dead jerks, know-it-alls, angry relatives, serious pretenders,
odd insectoid creatures and sincere helpful entities that usually got
constantly interrupted by the disintegrating subconscious residues from
innocent, confused dead folk.

Three guys were putting a roof on the complex and were working directly
above the bakery. The guys were young, healthy, able, busy at work, laughing
now and then at each other, and were oblivious of any potential hibernation,
enforced or voluntary, occurring beneath them. I remembered this TV commercial
about a technical school where this student was bragging about how the
school's program allowed him to escape roofing as if it was punishment
for being alive. Now he could be involved in computers, technical matters,
routers, modems, electronic signals in general, and lose any beneficial
internalization that the roofers got when they ascended just a little
higher than everyone else and caught some air that hadnt touched
the ground yet and bounced off into someone elses disinterested
lungs. Plus they sincerely got in touch with their adrenaline functions
from time to time if the pitch was steep or slippery. The commercial was
saying in a nice, happy way that people who worked basic jobs had no mind,
no chance of happiness, and were slaves, which I felt was incredibly wrong.
Automatically I projected black streaks of hatred and betrayal upon the
people that made this commercial.

Disguising galvanization of workers to better themselves by humiliation
was all backfire. I felt odd that a small thing like a TV commercial could
command such a passionate indignant response from me, but they say TV
is the great frontier of the mind and that people psychically connect
through it like an altar, subconsciously, when they watch the same programs
at the same time. I had synced up with the angst of the great worker wad
via the anti-roofing commercial. Big deal. Wasteland, but why? Maybe during
a Bond film on cable at night, one of the older cool ones, like Diamonds
Are Forever, I noticed that the air tasted differently and felt there
was a positive nightshade twilight hovering about somewhere in the ether.
Maybe. I guess thats how Christ will come back, in the group viewing
mind in the twilight, when it feels right and we are connected on a similar
focal point, yet still retain our individual natures, full of potent nostalgia
we are only slightly ashamed of, yet invigorated enough by to imitate.
Yes, Jesus was James Bond. Ian Fleming was one of the prophets reincarnated
to douse us over and over in super technical parables of houdiniesque
extrication. Roll away the stone, get away from Pussy Galore, whats
the difference. Here comes Thumper, Dr. Goldfinger, and Beelzebub. I didnt
mind having a modern fractured mind, after I realized what a modern fractured
mind was, and that 'fractured' wasnt necessarily 'bad'some
of that modern stuff came in handyit let light come through all
the broken pieces. I knew television had a lot to do with modern fracture,
and a walk in the woods would disturbingly bring me back to nature and
to a type of mind that I felt alien to and shamed by. I avoided the woods.
I couldnt understand current history. Everyone was doing more and
more, yet making less progress. But I knew I was making progress. I just
wasnt getting any credit for it in society. Whether in church during
the sermon or sitting through classes at school I felt that phases of
history were not occurring as rapidly as they used to. Everyone that was
super educated thought it was the other way around, but I knew things
were slowing down on the big scale. I swear it smelled like people believed
subconsciously they were on that carnival ride that spun around hard and
pressed them against the wall and then dropped the floor out.

Except this one had a strobe light that flickered separate frames of information
into their noggins against their will. They consciously felt activated
and stimulated by tons of events, but those events were just
waves of historical reverb teasing their neurons into silly self important
angst. Some giant hairball of a dream on the horizon of the past was vibrating
selfishly giving off super death vibes tricking people into thinking those
vibes were real events. Death throes of a hairball. I knew things were
slowing down on the big scale. The little pieces within whatever great
phase of history was happening at the time bustled about like iron filings
under a historical magnet, yet the magnet didnt move around as much
as it used to. The filings were transfixed, erect, full of subtle vibration,
but weren't going anywhere. The great changes occurred less often as time
progressed, but the little pieces within the changes just vibrated more
madly, slated with the task of integrating all the past big changes into
a stable, happy individuality. People felt that big things were changing,
but they were just running in place at a faster pace. Hopefully I was
wrong on this because I was getting tons of migraines and I had all the
magnet I could stand for a while. The magnet just sped up random access
in the mind over time, and I bet if a normal life from one hundred years
ago was put on fast playback, it wouldnt look that much different
from a normal life today. Speed just gave you more stuff to look at in
less time. Made everyone feel bigger.

Speed was good and helped you survive, but it had to be high quality speed
and in the right amount, or it would just cause gibbering foolishness
and ADD of the soul. If you werent quick at the right time, you
would forget your best ideas and be overcome by your surroundingsthe
whirlpool. I had a dram of quicksilver in my nature and it had been a
lifesaver on more than a few occasions, but it would swell like the moon
at times and destroy my mental incubation stages that I needed to grapple
with the swirl of the whirlpool. Just like air and water, I had to have
themthose slow motion plant growth necessitiesand it was a
constant battle to balance incubation needs from trying to be a quick
think-on-your-feet survivalist. People resented me when I figured out
which mode to be in and they couldnt. Had to act like a dumbshit
and hide the light when I felt I had a handle on what the problem was.
That got to be lonely at times except for the fishhook demons in the ass
raging away when they discovered I actually had a moment of clarity, but
that was better than mentally drifting on a carnival ride with a flashing
idiot scope in my eyeballs. But I still couldnt keep up with the
big changes of history. They were too spread out. I always had to read
about them and reflect on themI hated that I could never experience
a big change directly. Big changes occurred in slow motion but you had
to study them in fast motion. That wasnt fair. No one ever got to
experience big changes in real time. Oh, there were big events and disasters,
but those were only furious vibrating pieces of iron in the blood. It
was a big tease. The bakery woman kept asking me Will there be anything
else?" every time she got the chance. I guess she wanted to make
more sales. The prices were good. I bought six cranberry oatmeal cookies
and ate a few of them on the spot. Later at home I threw the rest in the
backyard for the birds because they were a bit stale. The cranberries
were like red raisins.

A hardware store run by a family was next to the bakery, and they always
had familiar old timers sitting around. One was an invalid who sat in
a wheelchair near the large plate glass window. These old fellows always
knew where everything was in the store and could sense when you were aimlessly
wandering from aisle to aisle. They had a way of asking what were you
looking for with authority yet did so without making you feel like an
idiot. I had been in this store tons of times looking for tape, screws,
mailboxes, air conditioner filters, hardware cloth to keep raccoons out
of the atticyour basic hardware needs. The store had local bluegrass
groups play on Saturday mornings, and the floorspace between the key making
machine and the huge bins of masonry nails became a gathering place for
a generation that was used to gathering in such places. I went to buy
a mailbox one Saturday last year, after some kids had whacked it with
a bat the previous night, and I entered into a store full of grandpas,
papaws, meemaws, aunts, uncles and grandmas. They looked at me like I
was a god damned alien. I just slinked out and they didnt feel bad
about it at all.

A 24hr quick stop gasoline snack beer place shared the same parking lot
as the hardware store and bakery, and it felt like a taint on the block.
They sold cheap speed at the counter with cigarettes, and stacks and racks
of warm wine coolers and bad magazines and tabloids lined the wall near
the door. The floor had a sour smell like a rancid mop had just been used
on it, and the dirty linoleum had ripples in some areas and was missing
in some spots, showing a black plastic grooved material underneath. I
had gotten gas there a few times, but the place was weird. It wasnt
like most 24hr gas places. It was so unkempt that the place behaved like
it was in contempt of the older more stable stores that it shared the
parking lot with. I went in to get a coke after buying the cookies. The
clerk was a small blonde woman in her forties who had her midriff exposed,
showing a pierced belly button. She wasnt fat but her skin was pasty
and loose. She looked tired and acted like a nerve racked bartender flitting
behind the counter from the cash register to the window that faced the
gas pumps, even though there were no cars getting gas. I bought my coke
and shed my skin as I left.